July at The Kitchen Reader Food Book Club is the novel month when members read The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. 

A synopsis from the publisher tells a story about Rose Edelstein who can tell how someone feels by eating the food that he/she cooks.

This ability begins when she is nine, celebrating her birthday and eating her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and in each bites she feels sensations such as absence, hunger, spiraling, and hollows.

The 304 pages soft cover copy that I read is from the tenth printing of the first Anchor Books Edition, indicating how well accepted the novel is. Compliments come from big media such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Chicago Tribune, LA Weekly; and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Well she’s for real. … She’s like a magic food psychic or something.

That’s it. Lines 24 to 26 on page 66 lines 24 – 26 perfectly sum up what the book is all about.

Rose, the main character, daughter of Lane and Paul Edelstein and Joseph’s little sister is a food psychic.

The way Aimee Bender depicts food in the book, from the hollowness of lemon chocolate cakes, a chicken that tastes weird, the slight metallic absent taste of chocolate chips cookies to how soup crusted with cheese, golden at the edges smell warmingness lead to her as a dishwasher in a French restaurant and eventually ranked as its food taster.

The affair of Lane Edelstein with Larry, her friend from a woodworking workshop keeps coming back to the pages starting when Rose was 12 years old up to her adulthood.  At the same time the story about the affair shows Lane’s skills progressing from making simple products to cabinetry to doors with wooden hinges without nails, a skill based on Japanese carpentry.

I have sympathy for Joseph, 5 years older than Rose, her mother’s favorite child and the genius in the family. Unfortunately Joseph does not get accepted at Caltech while George, his only friend, is doing good in that school of the smarts.

At first the novel is not engaging enough for me to turn the pages, but after a while I start to feel the intertwine of emotions created by Aimee Bender. The author not only good in illustrating food porn, but also in building suppressed feelings perfectly.

In the first pages of the book (p.10) Rose describes her mother's lemon-chocolate cake: None of it was a bad taste, so much, but there was a kind of lack of wholeness to the flavors that made it taste hollow, like the lemon and chocolate were just surrounding a hollowness.

Towards the end of the book (p.258) Rose illuminates the moments at George’s wedding, the guy she admires since childhood: The band finished up the last notes of the song. Tables clapped, tiredly. Someone called for the cake, and George kissed my cheek and squeezed my hand and thanked me and gave me as much as he could in that moment until time and progress ripped him away and he returned to his bride, who welcomed him in her arms like he’d been at sea for weeks.

Set in Los Angeles, the novel is a mixture of psychology-suspense-woodworking-culinary episodes.

Unpredictable plots, unique and sensitive characters and surreal story telling show the author’s skills and qualities. As a creative writing professor in California who has written 6 books and a number of short stories, Aimee Bender told The Sycamore Review: Teaching writing is a whole different animal, and it suits me because it supplies the more social aspect of work, whereas writing is so solitary. I can’t write all day—my concentration flags. I love talking with students about their writing, and workshopping, and talking about fiction in general, but it all feels to me very different than the act of writing itself. So they work as a nice pair.

---------------------------

Images: Maryna Kulchytska/Shutterstock; all others: Omar Niode Foundation